Why doesn't **sort** sort the same on every machine?

bash unix sorting ksh
Jon Ericson picture Jon Ericson · Aug 26, 2008 · Viewed 7.1k times · Source

Using the same sort command with the same input produces different results on different machines. How do I fix that?

Answer

Henrik Gustafsson picture Henrik Gustafsson · Aug 26, 2008

The man-page on OS X says:

******* WARNING ******* The locale specified by the environment affects sort order. Set LC_ALL=C to get the traditional sort order that uses native byte values.

which might explain things.

If some of your systems have no locale support, they would default to that locale (C), so you wouldn't have to set it on those. If you have some that supports locales and want the same behavior, set LC_ALL=C on those systems. That would be the way to have as many systems as I know do it the same way.

If you don't have any locale-less systems, just making sure they share locale would probably be enough.

For more canonical information, see The Single UNIX ® Specification, Version 2 description of locale, environment variables, setlocale() and the description of the sort(1) utility.

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